Psychiatry and Abuse: restraint chair in hospital?

Perople have died in this restraint chair -- in Guantanamo, yet they made me sit in one in Manchester Hospital in Connecticut, 2009

Some memories are returning. Not a great many but this one was triggered by something I heard briefly on television the other day, simply the mention in some other context, of the words “restraint chair” and in an instant I flashed back (and I use those two words advisedly, since I do not actually know what is meant by a “flashback”) on something that happened when I was a priso…excuse me, patient, albeit involuntary, at Manchester Hospital in the fall of 2009.

This had been an extremely brutal stay up till then. When I was admitted the psychiatrist I was assigned to Dr BZ — I have written of this elsewhere so I won’t recap the whole thing, as memory is fickle and I may have misremembered it by now — stopped most or all of my meds, saying that if I was there, clearly they didn’t work. Then he swore I would take the one drug I refused to take: Zyprexa, and he scheduled a forced medication hearing, which naturally I would lose, having no power and only my word against his as to whether or not I needed it. Well, I did lose it, but inexplicably, and sadistically, instead of forcing on me a drug that by all accounts helped me, he changed this to TRILAFON, an old drug that did nothing for me and only made me completely miserable.

The upshot was that every time they came to me with medications, I flatly refused to take the Trilafon, even under the threat of a Haldol injection, The goon squad was called, and since I refused to quietly accept my punishment, they assaulted me, stripped me, and forcibly injected me. This got to the point that they started four point restraining me to the bed, just to inject me…And it because such a routine that to avoid the “tiresome process” of getting out the restraints they simply left them attached to my bed. I know this not because i remember it but because my friend Josephine told me she saw them.

Me? I was so snowed by Haldol most of the time, that I could never even find my room, and had a sign in large letters taped to the door so I would simply recognize it when and if I managed to find it. Also, I was so dazed that I had to wear red slipper socks as a fall risk…but no one ever decided that maybe this was due to the drugs they were giving me!

Anyhow, one day, one day…and here is where memory kicked in after hearing those awful words on TV: one day the nurse who was most in charge of the daily torment, came to the door with another nurse pushing this large chair, and i recognized what it was at once. I had seen them before, having reviewed a book a long time before for the LA Weekly on the treatment of the mentally ill both in hospitals and prisons, a book, moreover decrying “barbaric treatments” of the past.

“You aren’t going to put me in that, are you? I’m not coming anywhere near it!” I shrank away from them and ran to the other side of my bed.

“We won’t restrain you, not if you behave. But we want you to sit in it for today. There are no restraints on it now. It is just a comfortable chair. Come, sit down. The student nurse will be with you all day today.”

Then they essentially forced me to sit down and stay in the chair. Or else…I was terrified. and the student nurse knew it. Luckily, she would turn out to be a kind and wonderful young woman (her experience at Manchester almost drove her away from psych nursing, but as it turned out she discovered Natchaug Hospital, and became one of their most beloved nurses). As she told me later — because memory mostly fails me here, but for her reminders — she did Reiki with me, the practice of nearly touching a person but not quite, and moving her hands along my body, not sure how it works or worked, but she later told me, at Natchaug, that I responded well to it, and stayed calm all day. I even as she said, took my meds. Which means I actually swallowed the Trilafon, probably because I couldn’t bear to have another fight in front of her.

Whatever was the case, if Reiki is as I described it, no wonder I responded well, as it was a NON-physical therapeutic way of dealing with me, non-assaultive, gentle, non-trespassing and non-brutal. Why the rest of them could not have followed suit or come up with some other way to treat me as she did, I will never know. Clearly they learned nothing from her; she left and likely they are back to treating others as they did me.

I believe they would indeed have used that chair as a restraint chair on me. I do not think they brought it in just as a comfortable chair, I believe it was to intimidate me, to cow me, but I think too that they were in fact prepared to use it. I do not have the slightest doubt. I would put nothing past those people who so brutalized me as to put me in four point restraints over and over during more than 8 days. For all I know it might have been more than eight days. I simply do NOT know, as amnesia has sealed up much more than memory preserved.

Enough for now. I need to write tomorrow about the Versatile Blogger Award that DogKisses gave to me. I am shamefully late in thanking her. And I do not know how to place the badge on my site, but she was such a lovely blogger to do so, that I do owe her her own post of thanks and appreciation.